Here are the results of our most recent psychic experiment!
When my boyfriend originally sent me this photo, I had already correctly identified quite a lengthy string of people, so he informed me that this one was meant to be a “challenge” for me.
“Bring it on!” I shouted, pumping my fists Rocky-esque into the air.
Or probably not.
But you gotta admit it sounds cooler that way.
I figured that if she was really a challenge, i.e. perhaps not quite as well known as the others, my best chance of finding her would be to work out what her name was, and as usual my synesthesia came in handy for this task.
So as soon as I opened the photo in my email, I started trying to get a sense of her colors right away.
“Is one of her names red?” I asked Chuck after looking at her for a moment or two.
“Yes, actually,” he replied, looking a bit surprised (he was kind enough to memorize my synesthetic alphabet colors shortly after meeting me, which needless to say bought him about a million-quadrillion boy-points, which are also red).
“Is it her last name, like, maybe a B?” I wanted to know.
“Yes, her last name does start with a B,” he answered, looking even more surprised.
She didn’t want to tell me much more at that moment, but as I returned to her over the next day or so, I kept getting impressions of a go-go dancer or a stripper, and the name Betty kept popping into my head.
I asked Chuck about Betty, and he confirmed that this name did have a connection to the person in the photo, as did the stripper/prostitute concept.
So I kept working.
Over dinner that night, I asked Chuck if the last name had a double letter in it. He said that it did.
“Is the double letter an L?” I wondered out loud.
He confirmed that it was.
“I’ve been hearing the name Bell or maybe Bella for a while now,” I told him.
Looking startled again, he said “Her last name is Bell.”
Oh. Well.
That oughtta do it.
With the clues I already had, and especially the last name, it didn’t take much more searching to figure out the identity of this young woman.
Her name is Mary Bell, and as two of my readers, Lisa and seabluelee correctly guessed (but you don’t think it was psychically – really?) she was in fact a killer.
In 1968, when she was 11 years old, Mary murdered and mutilated two young boys, Martin Brown and Brian Howe. I will spare you the grisly details – unless you really want them, in which case here are two links that don’t spare much of anything:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Bell
http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders/famous/bell/index_1.html
Interestingly, I did not get a sense that Mary was an evil person when I was reading her aura, and I’m still not convinced that she is one.
Her mother, whose name, not surprisingly, was Betty, was in fact a prostitute who allegedly forced Mary to engage in sexual activity with men from the age of four, and who cruelly abused the young girl in other ways as well.
It seems pretty likely that Mary is a sociopath, based on her actions and her demeanor during the case, but it’s also clear that the abuse she endured may well have been the cause of her behavior.
Now, I’m not a big believer in the concept of evil as such, but rather in damage – and it seems obvious to me that while Mary may have been born with what I would call innate or inherent damage, she also received a great deal of applied damage from her mother, and this combination is fairly common in triggering a sociopath to take murderous action, where otherwise they might not.
In fact, Mary served twelve years in incarceration, and has apparently not offended again since that time. She has a daughter and a granddaughter, and was granted lifelong anonymity in 2003, so it is impossible to know exactly what she’s doing these days.
But if she had killed somebody else, I daresay we would have heard about that.
Oddly enough, when I was reading her initially, I was getting something about her being a nurse (and who knows what might have been, before or long after all that damage got applied).
In reading about her afterwards, when asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she replied that she would like to be a nurse, so that she could stick needles into people and hurt them.
Not exactly what I had in mind, but hey.
What we need here is therapy.
Lots and LOTS of therapy.
Thanks to my readers for playing along! I was interested in Martina’s comment that she connected Mary with Sylvia Plath: for one thing, Sylvia was an extremely disturbed person, but more intriguingly, her best-known work of literature and only novel just happens to be called The Bell Jar.
Coincidence? Or psychic tickle?
You decide.
And drop me a comment! I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Speaking of coincidences, in researching this person, I kept getting a strong sense of water, swimming, and youngest-person-to-do-something. In searching for Mary Bell (once I knew her last name), I immediately ran across Marilyn Bell, who was the youngest person to swim Lake Ontario and the English Channel.
Who knew?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_Bell
